SOLVED! CTD issue helped immensely

**RebelCub** · March 15, 2011, 09:38 AM

Saw this posted on another forum for EB and it has reduced my CTD's by like 85% or so.

http://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showth...Solution-Found!

It is my hypothesis that RTW is unable to handle multi processors properly like many older games and so far it has proven to be accurate. I stlll get the occasional crash every now and then but I have managed to play for 60-100 years without a single crash while following the other crash prevention steps.

Steps to follow:

1. Load your EB until the "Single player, Continue campaign, Multiplayer... etc" screen comes up.
2. Alt+Tab your EB so you return to windows (If you play it in windows mode like I do then you can skip this step).
3. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to bring up task manager.
4. In Task Manager there will be several tabs. What you want will be the "Applications tab". Look for your "Rome: Total War".
5. Right click on your "Rome: Total War" and then in drop down box listed options select "Go To Process"
6. You should now be in the "Process" tab with your .exe highlighted. (I play with the Alexander .exe file so for me "rometw-alx.exe" is selected.)
7. Right click on the highlighted .exe and in the drop down box select "Set Affinity..."
8. The "Processor Affinity" box should now be up with a list of CPUs from 0 - 31. There will be many greyed out boxes but for those of you with multi core processors, you will see several with ticks. (I have a dual core processor so my "CPU 0" and my "CPU 1" are ticked)
9. You will then need to untick all the boxes EXCEPT for one to set affinity to that core only.
10. Click "Okay" and quit Windows Task Manager.
11. Enjoy your (hopefully) stable EB session!

You do have to do this everytime you start the game unfortunately. But it helps immensely. So try it out.

**chris10** · March 15, 2011, 10:00 AM

I wonder if this a dual core specific issue maybe since I run a i5 quad core without any CTD at all in over 100 ingame hours and huge battles..
hope it solves some of the battle CTDs for dual core users

**mudang** · March 15, 2011, 04:01 PM

Originally Posted by chris10

I wonder if this a dual core specific issue maybe since I run a i5 quad core without any CTD at all in over 100 ingame hours and huge battles..
hope it solves some of the battle CTDs for dual core users

IMHO I don't think it's a processor issue, I have a i5 (same as you) but I still get some CTDs (not a lot of constant) .. paticularly in bridge battles so I suspect it might be due to a lot of bodies stacked on top of each other, some battles continuously crash as I found after several replays but reducing the quality of the graphics seems to help a lot.

**Dramatic Cat** · March 15, 2011, 10:15 AM

lol

I had already seen this in other totalwar.org forums. Doesnt really work for everyone. Well at least not for meh and i use phenom2 x2 at 4.11

Any way, that doesnt meen my game is laggy (until moar than 10000 men on the battle field).

**Ferdiad** · March 15, 2011, 11:20 AM

I have a qaudcore and this dosn't help much tbh, I stopped using a long time ago after seeing it didn't help me.

**dvk901** · March 16, 2011, 09:39 AM

From what I have read, RTW's problem is not multi-core processors. It cannot ACCESS multi-core processors, but it doesn't have an issue with running on them. It simply accesses one core.

The real issue, admitted by CA\Sega, both for RTW and M2TW, is an instability that occurs at some point during playing the games on machines with 2GB or more of memory. (At least, that's what I remember)
Apparently, the EXE's for these games were not written to handle that amount of memory, and after a long time of play, memory starts to 'degrade' or become corrupted...in short, RTW is losing track of parts of itself in memory, and CTD's start to
occur. Whe a software program starts losing track of memory usage (it's own), this can lead to other software stomping on areas of memory that actually being used, even though Windows doesn't 'think' they are being used. In the old days of Windows95\98, this would result in a 'Blue Screen of Death'....but since XP and on, the offending software is just summarily 'terminated'.

According to CA, there is no way to fix this, and they have no intention of doing so. I would simply recommend that one save often to different named saved games, and that one exit the game and restart after a long time of playing.
What's a 'long time'? I really don't know. An hour, I guess, would be a good place to start...or at some point where you notice that RTW is starting to act a little 'strange' (lot of lag time, oddball graphics showing up, transitions between battles and the strat map taking a really long time and the screen going black first and fading in, or background screens disappearing althogether.) These are all signs that RTW is 'struggling' to survive. In fact, if background screens disappear during transitions, it is time to restart the PC, because video memory has gotten corrupt.

**ghost13** · March 16, 2011, 03:46 PM

Originally Posted by dvk901

From what I have read, RTW's problem is not multi-core processors. It cannot ACCESS multi-core processors, but it doesn't have an issue with running on them. It simply accesses one core.

The real issue, admitted by CA\Sega, both for RTW and M2TW, is an instability that occurs at some point during playing the games on machines with 2GB or more of memory. (At least, that's what I remember)
Apparently, the EXE's for these games were not written to handle that amount of memory, and after a long time of play, memory starts to 'degrade' or become corrupted...in short, RTW is losing track of parts of itself in memory, and CTD's start to
occur.

So then an actual solution would be:
Close all applications, and terminate all processes you dont absolutely need before running the game which will create more ram within the 2gb limit that the game can access
Save Quit and Restart game every couple of hours

**dvk901** · March 16, 2011, 03:53 PM

Originally Posted by Ferdiad

So really bad memory leak?

No, not necessarily.

Originally Posted by ghost13

So then an actual solution would be:
Close all applications, and terminate all processes you dont absolutely need before running the game which will create more ram within the 2gb limit that the game can access
Save Quit and Restart game every couple of hours

No, and yes. Closing applications and making more memory available isn't 'really' a solution. It could help on a ram starved machine (1GB or below), but the amount of ram isn't the issue.
The issue, as I remember reading it, is that RTW and M2TW have a built-in issue with any machine with more than 2GB of ram. It isn't a memory 'leak'...more like an issue with how to address it.
It's as if the program is saying to itself: "Hmm, this machine has more ram than I was written to be able to address. I'll 'try' working with it and using it, but it's likely I'm going to have trouble, because
the guy who wrote me didn't exactly spell out how to do it."

Why this wasn't fixed in M2TW I have no idea....there's no excuse for that, as mega ram PC's were common when it came out. But in the RTW hey-day, PC's had maybe 1GB of RAM and a lot of people were still using Windows98.